


A Ghost of a Chance

by Rod



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, CSI: Miami, Jake 2.0
Genre: Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-07
Updated: 2013-02-07
Packaged: 2017-11-28 13:45:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 19,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/675067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rod/pseuds/Rod
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On a mission in Miami, Buffy comes across a familiar face working for the Miami-Dade crime lab, and someone who reminds both of them of... a ghost?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Spoilers:** Buffy 2.19 _(I Only Have Eyes For You)_ and CSI: Miami 3.1 _(Lost Son)_. No particular spoilers for Jake 2.0.
> 
>  **Disclaimer:** I am not Joss, Mutant Enemy, Jerry Bruckheimer, Anthony Zuiker, Alliance Atlantis, Silvio Horta or Roundtable. I therefore own none of the primary characters, worse luck. I've also borrowed heavily from the backgrounds for Speed and Tyler that Caroline Crane developed in her stories, and that's emphatically something that she should get the credit for, not me.
> 
>  **Notes:** Christopher Gorham played both Jake Foley in Jake 2.0 and James Stanley (the ghost) in "I Only Have Eyes For You" . The first kid that the ghost possesses is played by Brian Poth, who also played A/V tech Tyler Jensen in CSI: Miami. That kid is never named...

Tyler Jensen sat out in the bright Miami sun, staring into his espresso as if he expected to read the future in its inky depths. Sometimes he wished he could, but all he saw in what had become this lunchtime ritual was the past. The contented past that ended one month and fourteen days earlier when Tim Speedle went into a jewelry store with his boss and came out in a body-bag. The past one month and six days ago when he couldn't force himself to attend Speed's funeral, because he could just imagine the looks of their colleagues and he couldn't stand that even in his imagination. And the past twenty seven days earlier when he realised he was functionally insane.

Tim shifted in his chair. "Brooding really isn't a good look on you," he said.

"Shut up." Tyler didn't look up from his coffee as he spoke. If he didn't look, he wasn't really imagining Tim sitting next to him. Plus it didn't seem so much like he was talking to himself.

"I mean it." Out of the corner of the eye that he wasn't keeping on Tim, really he wasn't, Tyler saw movement and he knew that if he did look he'd see concern on that normally guarded face. "You're a good actor and you've got the rest of the lab fooled, but I know you better than that."

There was no answer to that, really, Tyler thought. Speed did know — had known — Tyler better than that, and it looked like Tyler wasn't even allowed to lie to himself anymore.

Speed sighed. "Look, I've been where you are. You keep going the way you are right now, and all you'll do is let it consume you."

Tyler looked up, staring straight at Tim for once. "Like you did," he said trying to keep the hurt out of his voice. Did he really need to give himself this lecture?

"Yeah." Tim coloured and looked away. Tyler had to close his eyes for a moment, reminding himself that this was a figment of his imagination, that he couldn't hurt someone who wasn't really there. He felt guilty about it anyway.

When he looked back, Tim was still looking away. Tyler recognised the set of his jaw, though; apparently he was going to get the lecture anyway. "Yes," Speed said, "I spent years too scared that I'd get hurt again. I don't want you to have to go through that. The way I hear it, there's a shortage of good-looking A/V technicians available for pulling people's heads out of their asses."

Tyler did his best to ignore the typically indirect declaration of love, because it did hurt and it did make him scared for the future. Especially if that future included seeing his dead gay boyfriend everywhere he looked. But all the same it didn't hurt so much that he couldn't function, and in some ways seeing Speed all the time was a positive thing; when he finally stopped seeing Tim, he'd know that he was ready to move on.

That still left him sitting alone in a cafe struggling with the irrational urge to comfort a hallucination of his dead boyfriend.

"You were still a teenager when you lost David," he said, remembering to talk into his coffee cup so the other customers wouldn't think he was crazy. Even if he was.

"Sometimes I wonder if you've ever grown up," Speed told him.

"Which would make you a dirty old man," Tyler fired back. Tim didn't quite manage to suppress a smile at that, and Tyler didn't even try not to grin at him. "Seriously though, you were there when it happened. One moment everything was great, and the next he was in a coma and you barely had a scratch on you. That's one big load of survivor guilt to get over."

"And you're such an expert on survivor guilt."

"I could write the book." That got Tim's attention. Maybe he shouldn't have sounded so bitter that the real Tim would have noticed, but it wouldn't have mattered for this imaginary Tim anyway. He had never really told Tim much about his life before working for the Miami-Dade crime lab, just a few happy moments and some vague generalisations, a few bits and pieces about college and some of what he saw before he realised he wasn't destined for Broadway after all. Apparently his subconscious thought he should have told Tim more, because Tim was giving him that 'I want to know but I'm not going to push' look that Tyler knew so well that he had to swallow down the lump in his throat.

"I never lost anyone that close," he said as evenly as he could, "but a hell of a lot of friends of mine died over the years. Did you know my home town had a murder rate that makes Miami look like a kindergarten? Graduating classes used to track their mortality rates like football results. So yes, I do know a little about survivor guilt."

Speed looked like Tyler had pole-axed him. He reached out as if to touch Tyler reassuringly on the shoulder, then hesitated and pulled back with a grimace. "That sucks, man," he said uncertainly, and Tyler knew him well enough to get the protectiveness and love under the awkward words. "How could something like that happen? Why wasn't it all over the papers?"

Tyler shrugged. "It doesn't really matter, the whole town fell into a sink-hole a year or two ago."

"I think I read about that," Speed said, frowning. "Wasn't it somewhere in California?"

"Sunnydale."

"That's it. The article said something about the town being evacuated, so there were very few deaths. There must be people you grew up with all over the country by now."

"All over California maybe," Tyler snorted, "but it was only a small town, thirty-odd thousand population. Seriously, what are the chances that anyone I know is going to turn up in... Summers?"

"What?" Tim asked, but Tyler was ignoring him in favour of the small blonde woman that he remembered all too well from his school days. He hadn't meant to say her name quite so loudly, but evidently she'd heard him because she turned to face him across the cafe table.

"Uh, hello?" she said uncertainly. "I know your face, but I can't..."

"Tyler Jensen," Tyler said, standing and offering his hand. Experience had taught him that it paid to be polite to people like Summers — OK, people who hit like Summers. "I was a year ahead of you at Sunnydale High."

Summers frowned, then smiled. "I think I remember you now. I'm just surprised you remember me."

Tyler smiled wryly, not sure that she wasn't just being polite. "It's hard to forget someone tossing you down a corridor," he told her. Which was true, even if he was rather hazy as to why she'd thrown him. There'd been something about a gun, but he'd never had one before starting work at the crime lab and he didn't carry the one he'd been issued even now if he could help it.

Tim must have stood up, he noted idly, since he was now staring at Summers at close range. "She tossed you down a corridor? Ty, I know you're not the heaviest guy in the world, but—"

"This was before the Sadie Hawkins Dance?" Buffy asked, interrupting him. Which was fair enough, Tyler couldn't expect her to be polite to his delusions after all. He nodded. "Wow. Um, I'm sorry about that. It was all... are you still with, uh..."

"Tracy?" Tyler offered, taking pity on her. He shook his head. "No, we broke up before I left for college. How about..." Tyler trailed off as he realised that all he knew about Summers' love-life at high school were vague rumours about her and an older man. "Would you like a coffee? This place does great cappuccinos, and I've still got twenty minutes of my lunch break left."

Summers hesitated, then smiled at him. "Sure, why not?" she said. "It's not like I'm in a super hurry to get somewhere."

While she busied herself with getting seated, flagging down a waiter and getting a drink, Tim fixed Tyler with one of those stares Tyler was never quite sure how to interpret. "Tracy?" Tim asked. "Do you have a thing for people whose names begin with a 'T'?"

He was probably being teased, Tyler decided. He threw a quick 'You're not helping' glare at Speed as he sat back down and paid attention to his guest. "So, what brings you to Miami?"

Summers made a face. "Work," she said. "I work for these experts on history and archaeology with a big side-order of folklore. They hear about something interesting, and send me off to investigate it for them."

"In Miami?"

"Oh yeah. It's to do with one of the, um, ethnic communities. It's kind of involved."

Tim was staring at her pretty hard, Tyler noticed out of the corner of his eye. "Nothing illegal I hope," he joked, wondering exactly what had caught his dead boyfriend's interest.

She gave him a strange look. "Believe it or not, I've been assured by a serious lawyer that if I stick to my job description, I can't technically do anything illegal. Only he used bigger words."

Tyler held up his hands in surrender. "Sorry, it's kind of a regulation bad joke. I work for the local crime lab."

"You're a criminalist?"

"Just a lowly technician. I get to sit in my nice, safe lab while the CSIs take the heat out on site." Summers gave him another odd look, but it wasn't until he noticed how awkwardly Tim was trying not to look at him that Tyler realised how bitter he must have sounded.

"Sounds like you want to get out there," Summers said.

"God, no! It's just..." Tyler looked at her again, and realised that she would understand. She'd survived Sunnydale. He took a deep breath. "We lost someone recently, shot in the line of duty. I miss him."

He just meant to say the words out loud, finally, to someone who would understand and didn't know Tim, because some crazy mixed-up portion of his hind-brain knew that Speed didn't like having his private life be public gossip and wouldn't let that happen even now. He just meant to say the words, but he could feel himself choking up as he said them. "Oh God, I miss him so much," he repeated, and the tears started.

The pain of loss, now that he stopped denying it, was overwhelming. It came crashing down on Tyler in a welter of images of Tim as he had been. Tim in the lab, concentrating so hard on the evidence in front of him that he didn't notice Tyler staring in at him; Tim in the kitchen, sharing his love of food and turning cookery into something even Tyler could manage; Tim smiling, something rare enough that Tyler would never forget the first time he made it happen; Tim relaxed, the way he never was with anyone else; Tim above him, around him, beneath him, in him, at a thousand different moments in a thousand different places. Inexplicably mixed in but no less painful were images of a young man, still a boy really, and a woman lying shot dead. There was no end to this pain, Tyler knew, and his hand tried to grasp the gun he should have been holding.

Then Summers' hand covered his, Summers' eyes echoed his grief, and somehow she gave him the strength to pull himself together. "Sorry," he said thickly, "I didn't mean to..."

"It's OK." She meant it, too. The words weren't just platitudes, they came from deep personal experience. "When you lose someone you love, it's OK to miss them. Just don't let it take over."

"What have I been telling you?" Speed sounded gruff, and Tyler risked a glance at him. His dead boyfriend looked sad and frustrated, reaching out tentatively towards Tyler but never actually touching him. Which just about summed up life for Tyler, really.

"Sorry," Tyler said again, to both of them this time. "When I left Sunnydale, I thought life wasn't going to suck like this again."

Summers nodded, grimacing. "If it's any consolation, Sunnydale sucked right up to the end."

Tim snapped his fingers. "That's where I recognised her from. She was on the last bus out, the one that nearly didn't make it."

"You were there?" Tyler asked.

"Yeah. Not everyone made it." Simple words that spoke volumes to Tyler, and it was his turn to cover her hand as she looked away, lost in memories.

"Aren't you going to ask her what happened?" Tim said after a few moments of awkward silence. Tyler shook his head slightly, careful to make sure that Summers wasn't looking at him. This was Sunnydale business, and Tim wouldn't understand. You didn't ask. Ever.

"So," Summers said eventually, "'him', huh?" She smiled.

Tyler laughed. "Oh yeah. I discovered the wonders of dating guys in college. That's probably why Tracy and I never really worked."

"You want to talk about him?"

"No," Tyler said quite definitely, apparently surprising Summers. "He was a very private guy," he found himself saying, "I don't think he'd want me to be extolling his virtues." Tim was indeed squirming, so at least his subconscious agreed with him. "Almost no one in the lab knew we were together."

"I know the type." Summers smiled at him again, then glanced down at her watch. "Oh crap," she said, eyes widening. "I've really got to run, and I've kept you from work too long too. Here." She fished around in her handbag for a moment before producing a business card. "Give me a call if you ever want to talk about old times, or just talk. I can always do the talking thing. Have a good time if I don't see you again, and remember to stop off in the bathroom before you go back to work, your eyes are all puffy. Nice to see you again, Tyler."

Tyler stood as she did, holding her card and not quite keeping up with the babble. "Nice to see you too, Buffy Summers," he said to her rapidly retreating back.

He felt rather than saw Speed move to stand next to him. "Wow. First date and already she's given you her number. It's good to see you're moving on."

"Shut up," Tyler told him.


	2. Chapter 2

The next time Tyler saw Buffy was every bit as unexpected as the previous time. All the more so because he was working when it happened.

The Montgomery Hotel was the scene of a pretty calculated murder, the perpetrator of which had passed through the hotel's pool area on his way out. Or so Horatio Caine had declared, and while Tyler might find his boss a scarily obsessive man from time to time he never doubted Horatio's ability to read a crime scene. It therefore came down to Tyler to run through hours of security tapes, looking for signs of a killer.

When Buffy Summers appeared on screen, Tyler hit the pause button before he really registered what was happening. He wasn't unduly surprised at that; it was part of the way he normally worked, part of the reason he was so good at his job. He could rely on his subconscious to spot the unexpected, giving his conscious mind plenty of time to figure out if it was the right kind of unexpected. Now, apparently, he could rely on it to spot old friends too.

"Uh-oh," Tim said, leaning low over Tyler's shoulder to get a better look. "What's she doing there?"

Tyler ignored him. If his subconscious wanted to be that unsubtle, it could do it without having his conscious mind as a cheering section. He played the tape forward slowly, taking careful note of Summers' movements. She had come from the wrong entrance, he observed with some relief, and she went nowhere near the screen of shrubbery that had been used as a dump site.

"She's not our perp," he said confidently, winding back a few seconds to check that Summers' presence hadn't distracted him from the actual killer. Then he stiffened. "But why the hell is he following her?"

Summers's tail certainly stood out in the crowd. He was tall, bald, and slightly hispanic in appearance. Even though the guy was dressed like a tourist, Tyler had analyzed more than enough surveillance footage in his job not to be fooled for an instant by his stalking technique. And then there was the huge tattoo of an eagle across his face, its head stretching up past his forehead while its talons reached the corners of his mouth. Tyler shuddered as he paused the tape again; that must have hurt like hell when it was inked.

Tim straightened up again. "And why is no one paying attention to that guy?" he asked.

"Huh?"

"A tattoo like that gets attention," Tim pointed out. "People should be staring at him, or at least trying to pretend that they aren't. No one's even looking his way."

They weren't, Tyler had to agree. He was used to people doing strange and irrational things in his job, and he knew how Miami folk liked to put on an air of jaded decadence, but no way could they have ignored something as unusual as that guy. Heck, he would have expected most people to make sure they were a safe distance away from the weirdo and reach for their guns.

"Hmm." Tyler enhanced the stalker's face as best he could, hit the Print button and reached for his phone.

"Whoa," Speed said quickly, "what are you doing? This is evidence in a criminal investigation, you can't go around telling everyone what's on the tape."

"This is nothing to do with the investigation," Tyler said reasonably, fishing in his pocket for the business card that Summers had given him earlier. "They aren't suspects, neither of them were near enough to where the key was dumped. Besides, I know for a fact that more than once you started working on one crime and ended up solving another one."

Speed had no answer for that, so Tyler just threw him a smile and dialled the mobile number on the card. "What kind of organisation has offices in London, Rome and Cleveland?" he muttered. "Hi, Summers? It's Tyler Jensen."

"Tyler!" Buffy's voice was bright and cheerful, even a little teasing. "I know I told you to call me, but I wasn't expecting you so soon. People will talk."

"Ha ha, very funny," Tyler teased back, wondering how to break his news. He settled on the direct approach; Summers was the kind of woman who could take care of herself. He hoped. "I think you're being followed," he said.

"What?" Summers was all business now, no hint of humour in her voice.

"There was an incident at the Montgomery. I'm looking through their surveillance tapes, and I saw you walking through the pool area."

"Should you be telling me this?"

Tyler fought down the urge to tell her that Speed had said the same thing. "There's a whole barrel of reasons why you aren't a suspect," he said, which was true if you had a very small barrel. It was enough for him. "Anyway, there was a guy trying to sneak along behind you."

"Can you describe him?" Buffy asked.

"I can do better than that," Tyler told her, reaching for the page his printer finished spitting out. "I've got a glossy photo here all ready for you. You shouldn't need it, though. Just look for a tall, bald guy with a tattoo across half his face."

"What kind of tattoo?"

"An eagle. Mostly on his forehead, but it does dip right down."

There was a pause, in which Tyler imagined Summers looking carefully around herself. "'Seek to bring down the Eagle,'" she said softly.

"Pardon?"

"It's a line from the, uh, poem I got sent here to track down stuff about. A lot of it's pretty tedious, you know, the dark of the ninth moon shall run red with blood, yadda yadda, but that line suddenly sounds important. When are you free?"

"I get off shift in two and a half hours," Tyler told her. "Will that be OK? I could get someone to courier the photo to your hotel if you'd like?" He hoped not. Frankly he was getting very curious about exactly what was going on, and meeting her again seemed like the best way of finding out.

"Nah," Summers said, "I won't get back there for a while anyway. How about meeting me at that cafe again when you get out?"

"Sure, no problem. I'll see you in a couple of hours, then. I'd better get back to work before they notice me running up the department phone bill." And think up a bunch of good questions to ask about exactly what Summers did for a bunch of historians to get herself followed around Miami by weirdos.

"See you, then," Summers agreed, and hung up. Tyler put the phone down more slowly, still wondering exactly what it was she was mixed up in, and why she didn't seem more disturbed. Then he looked at Speed.

"Not a word about second dates," he said.

"I wouldn't dream of it," Tim said, trying and failing to look innocent. "You'd better look busy, Eric's coming."

Two and a half hours later, plus the time it took him to chat to security and make sure the section of footage of the killer he'd been looking for was safely stored in the evidence locker, Tyler made his way into the cafe. Summers was already seated, waiting impatiently for him.

"Any signs of your watcher?" he asked, signalling one of the waitresses to bring his usual espresso over.

Summers looked taken aback by the question. "Oh, Eagle guy," she said after a moment, understanding apparently dawning. "No. I've had the annoying feeling I'm being watched every now and then, but I haven't spotted him. Have you got that photo?"

"Here." Tyler pushed the glossy print over, watching as Summers cast a very professional eye over it. He wondered once again just what an antiquarian's gopher did to have her studying it like a CSI on a manhunt.

"So," he asked, "what was that poem about?"

"That? It's... kind of complicated."

"Try me. I am an English major after all," Tyler pointed out, "maybe I could help." Maybe he could, but mostly he was just curious. Judging from the interest that Tim was suddenly showing, he wasn't the only one.

Summers looked at him for a long while, then seemed to come to a decision. "OK," she said, "but I'll tell you for free it's pretty weird stuff." She dug around in her purse for a moment, eventually pulling out a much-folded piece of paper. "It's a translation, so don't take the wording too literally."

It was weird, Tyler had to concede, as bad as the course on Chaucer he'd inadvisedly taken in college. There were maybe a dozen lines of text, the rest of the page being filled with closely typed annotations offering alternatives, cross-references to sources Tyler wasn't too surprised never to have heard of, and at least one incomprehensible argument in footnotes between two researchers.

"About all my bosses were sure of," Summers told him, "was that the 'Eagle' that this is ranting about is down in this part of the country. When you told me about my stalker..."

"You're thinking some kind of secret society?" Tyler asked, trying not to laugh. This was too much like an Indiana Jones movie to be true.

"Uh-huh. And the rest of it is like a recipe for digging the dirt on them. Trust me, it happens more often than you'd think."

"Oh, that was slick," Speed said, sounding totally unconvinced. "There's something she's not telling you."

Tyler made a non-committal noise, trying to keep them both happy as he read on. "So all this stuff, 'Only with the quickness of the first murderer shall you succeed,' and so on, it's all clues to somewhere?"

Summers sighed. "Yeah, and the cryptic stuff never was my strong suit. I'd be better off trying to catch my tail and beating the answer out of him."

"I'll pretend I didn't hear that."

"You know, that would be a lot more convincing if you weren't trying not to smile. If you've got any ideas, I'm all ears."

"Unless it's something to do with Cain, as in Cain and Abel, I've got nothing. And I didn't think he was supposed to be particularly fast."

"I didn't have you pegged as the church-going type," Summers said, looking amused.

"I'm not," Tyler told her. "My boss's name is Caine, so it's the sort of thing I remember. What?"

Summers was frowning now, which was more than enough to have Tim studying her intently. "Is your boss a particularly quick guy?" she asked Tyler.

"Not unless you count solving crimes."

"That's more about being thorough than being quick," Tim pointed out, still watching Summers carefully.

"Anyway," Tyler continued smoothly, ignoring him, "I thought this would be about a place or something like that, not a living person."

"You'd be surprised," Summers said grimly. "I really don't believe in coincidences, and this is definitely worth thinking through. Come on, is there any way your boss is particularly quick? Does he drive a fast car? Is anyone else working for him particularly associated with speed? How about yo— what?"

Tyler felt the coffee going sour in his stomach. It was absurd. It couldn't have anything to do with this. But... "Remember my boyfriend?" he managed to say. "His name was Tim Speedle, and everyone called him 'Speed'."

Summers swore. "I'll bet he didn't die in an accident."

"He was shot, but you can't seriously expect me to believe—"

"It doesn't matter if you believe it. It only matters that they believe it."

Tyler didn't have an answer for that one. All he knew about Speed's death was that Horatio had brought in the killer. He hadn't been able to face any of the rest of the case; he hadn't been ready to let the full force of Tim's death in. Judging from the fact that he was still seeing his dead gay boyfriend everywhere, he still wasn't.

Said dead gay boyfriend leaned back in his seat and whistled softly. "Suddenly I'm all for beating the answers out of her stalker," he said. "And there he is, halfway down the block."

Tyler couldn't help looking up. It took him a long moment to focus on the face from the photo, standing some way down the street watching them. "There," he shouted, pointing at the man before he really took in what he was doing. "It's the guy who's been following you."

The stalker looked startled for a moment, then downright scared as Summers leapt up and took off after him in a clatter of chairs.

"Great," Tim muttered. "Try not to give it away next time."

Tyler ignored him and started to give chase himself. He was reasonably fit even if he didn't spend much time in the gym, so he was surprised at how quickly Summers pulled away from him. She was moving like an Olympic sprinter, rapidly narrowing the distance between her and her tail as he dodged around a corner. By the time Tyler himself made it to the corner, Summers was standing in the road staring at a van down the street as if she could stop it with sheer willpower. Tyler pulled up next to her, putting his hands on his knees and breathing hard.

"Can you run the license plate?" Summers asked.

Tyler nodded. "Probably," he gasped. Summers reeled the numbers off to him, and he memorised them carefully. He would write them down later, when he had something to write on. "That just leaves one obvious question," he said.

"Yeah," Tim said beside him. "Why weren't people staring at his tattoo again?"

"Where was his tattoo?" Tyler and Summers said together.


	3. Chapter 3

Tyler didn't sleep all that well the night after he met Summers the second time. There were too many questions dancing around in his head, most of which were prominently labelled as Sunnydale stuff. Questions about Speed's death, questions about the tattoo (and why Tim insisted he could see it), questions about Summers, all of them kept leaping to the front of his mind every time he closed his eyes.

He had to drag himself into work through a typically bright and sunny Miami day. It seemed wrong somehow, all that sunshine out there while everything was preying on his mind. It should be overcast, he thought: dull and threatening, like his dreams.

He might not have any easy way to answer his other questions, but he could find out more about Speed's death. Calleigh had obliquely let him know that she would get the file for him any time he wanted, but he hadn't been able to face it. If he didn't look, it hadn't happened; a typically Sunnydale reaction now Tyler thought of it. It had worked while he lived there, but now denial was failing him big time. Why else would he be seeing Tim everywhere?

Enough with the amateur psychoanalysis, Tyler thought to himself. He set aside the tedious bit of timestamp matching someone from the night shift had left him and set out to track Calleigh down.

She was in the ballistics lab, typically. Tyler didn't enjoy going in after her — he'd never been big on guns, and after Tim was shot that went double — but it seemed to be that kind of day.

Calleigh looked up and smiled as he walked in. "Hey Tyler," she said, still fishing around for the bullet she had fired into the water tank. "What drags you out of the video suite today? Not that I object to visits from people I don't see enough of, y'understand."

Tyler gave her a wan smile. "I need to know," he began, but choked up before he could get the rest of it out.

Calleigh's expression immediately became one of concerned compassion. "Are you sure you're ready for this, sweetie?" she asked.

"No," Tyler said candidly. "But I need to know how he died."

Calleigh nodded sadly. "You just sit here," she said, steering him gently over to a seat, "while I fetch the file."

Tyler expected Calleigh to leave him in peace for at least a couple of minutes to pull himself together. Closed files were supposed to be kept in the records room, to make them easy to find if any CSI decided to reopen an old case. It didn't happen often, and Tyler personally had nothing to do with Records itself, but it happened enough and with the most unpredictable cases that it made sense to be systematic, at least as far as Tyler could see.

So when Calleigh produced a file folder from her desk drawer in Ballistics, Tyler was a little surprised. Also grateful that he didn't have to wait that little bit longer, but it didn't do anything to dispel the confusion he'd been wandering around in since last night.

"I knew you'd want it sooner or later," she told him. "Keep it as long as you need to, then let me have it back and I'll put it into Records."

Tyler was nearly overwhelmed by Calleigh's quiet kindness. She knew him well enough to want to spare him the awkward questions, to spare him having to explain about Speed to the others. "Thank you," he said, taking the folder gingerly. He wasn't entirely sure he wanted it now that he had it, but he couldn't refuse it after all her kindness. That didn't stop him from wishing. "Can you tell me what happened?" he asked. If he didn't read the words, see the photographs...

Calleigh shook her head. "I think you need to read this for yourself and make up your own mind," she said. "I'm here afterwards if you want to talk about it, but you ought to draw your own conclusions first."

The file felt like a lead weight as Tyler walked back to the A/V lab. Even back in the safety of his own domain it made him nervous. Tyler put it down on his desk and sat staring at it for a long moment, summoning up the courage to start reading.

"What did she say?" Tim asked.

Tyler nearly jumped out of his skin. He whirled round and glared at Speed, who was now seated next to him, but bit back the comments that sprang to mind. There was no point in cussing out a figment of his imagination, he decided. "She told me to read it," he said eventually.

Tim looked at him expectantly. Tyler sighed, steeled himself, and flipped open the folder.

It took him the better part of an hour to read the file through. He couldn't make himself look at the autopsy photos, which Tim declared to be "a really weird experience" anyway, but he forced himself to read everything else: Alexx's clinical description of the cause of death that was still typically full of compassion, Horatio's dry, angry statement of the events in the jewellers, and Calleigh's bare analysis of Tim's gun that refused to draw conclusions.

The last one was what confused Tyler the most. Calleigh had avoided saying it, but it was clear even to Tyler that she thought Speed's gun had misfired because it hadn't been cleaned. Except that Tyler knew better.

"You cleaned your gun," he said aloud.

"Huh?"

"Two days before, you cleaned your gun. You hated doing it so much that you bitched incessantly about it, which is how come I remember. You cleaned it at least once a week for as long as we were together."

Tim made a face. "I hate guns," he said, "but after the last time I got shot at I promised myself I wasn't going to get caught like that again. If that meant doing the damn maintenance, then I'd do the damn maintenance."

"And yet..." Tyler put the report down open at Calleigh's conclusions. "Something was in the barrel, and it wasn't there when you cleaned it. I remember you checking it out."

Tim shrugged. "Guns get dirty," he said. "That's why you're supposed to clean them. Which reminds me, when was the last time you cleaned yours?"

Tyler ignored the attempted distraction; besides, he wasn't sure when the last time he'd seen his department-issue gun was, never mind the last time it was cleaned. "Did it hurt?" he asked.

The sudden change of direction seemed to catch Speed off guard. "What?"

"When you were shot, did it hurt?" Tyler would berate himself later for asking questions like that of someone who wasn't really there. For now, he needed some sort of reassurance.

Tim looked away, and for a moment Tyler thought he wasn't going to get an answer. Then Tim spoke, albeit mechanically and refusing to meet Tyler's eyes. "At first I was in shock," he said. "I didn't feel any pain, but I was panicking because I knew something was wrong. I couldn't breathe. Then, yeah, it did hurt, but only for a few seconds before I fell unconscious."

"I'm sorry," Tyler said quietly.

"There's nothing for you to be sorry for. There was no reason for you to be there, and if you had been there you might have died."

"You did die."

"And I'm the one who's sorry for that," Tim said, finally turning to look at Tyler. "I'm sorry I left you, and I'm sorry it's hurt you so much. I wish there was a way to turn the clock back and get the hell out of there, because I didn't ever want to see you this broken up."

"Love you." Quiet but heartfelt words, ones that Tyler had never quite dared to say while Speed was alive.

His imaginary Tim dealt with the declaration every bit as badly as he'd expected the real one would have, of course. He coloured, looked anywhere but at Tyler, and mumbled something inaudible. Then, because he was only imaginary, he looked back at Tyler and said, "Me too," before blushing some more and turning away again.

The moment was broken by the sound of the lab door being opened. Tyler mentally kicked himself for not keeping an eye out; the glass walls of his little domain didn't allow him much privacy, and he could well imagine one of his colleagues wondering what the hell he was doing talking to someone who wasn't there. He pulled himself together quickly, turning to the door and flipping Speed's file closed.

What he saw was Horatio Caine in one his more granite-faced moods, a woe-begone young man trailing along behind him. Tyler blinked; there was something oddly familiar about the young man, something he couldn't place.

"And this is our Audio-Visual laboratory," Horatio was saying, "run by Tyler Jensen. Tyler, this is Jake Foley, who has been loaned to us as a computer consultant. I want you to go through our systems with him and make sure he understands what our requirements are."

"Pleased to meet you, James," Tyler said, shaking the proffered hand and managing not to laugh at the over-eager smile Foley gave him. He hadn't missed the stress Horatio had laid on the word 'loaned'. By the sound of it Foley had been forced on the crime lab, and he'd probably been on the receiving end of Horatio's wrath ever since he arrived. Poor guy.

"Jake," Foley corrected him. "Glad to meet you too." He sounded every bit as grateful to be getting out of Horatio's blast radius as he looked. "I'll try not to get in your way."

"Are we interrupting something?" Horatio asked, looking pointedly at the file on Tyler's desk.

Oh crap, Tyler thought. Horatio more than anyone else knew that Tyler had no business dealing directly with case files. He couldn't lie about it; all Horatio would have to do would be to pick up the file, and that would be that. "I was reading Speed's file, sir," he said as formally as he could manage.

"Ah." Horatio inspected his hands for a moment before looking up and blowing Tyler away. "You were missed at the funeral." He reached out and clasped a shocked Tyler on the shoulder. "If you need any time off, just tell me. It's the least I can do for him."

"I... thank you," Tyler managed to stammer out. Horatio knew about him and Tim? "I don't know what to say."

"Just try not to leave that out where anyone can see it," Horatio said, indicating the file and flicking a quick glance at Foley.

Tyler took the hint. "Actually I was pretty much finished with it," he said. He gathered the file up and offered it to Horatio.

Horatio nodded, smiling. "Calleigh will be wanting it back, then," he said.

"Uh...?" Foley looked between Tyler and Horatio uncertainly.

"That would be private, Mr. Foley," Horatio said. His eyes never left Tyler and the smile never left his face, but his tone of voice brooked no dispute. "The personal lives of my staff are none of your concern."

With that and a slight inclination of the head to Tyler, Horatio turned and walked out of the lab leaving three shocked figures behind him.

"OK," Tim said eventually, "that was weird."

"Is he always like that?" Foley asked.

Tyler shook his head. "I don't think I've ever seen him so friendly."

Foley looked mildly alarmed. "And I thought I had it bad," he muttered.

"Speaking of which, who do you work for anyway?"

The question seemed to catch Foley off guard. "Uh, what?" he said, looking flustered.

"Oh, come on. You show up to assess our computing needs out of the kindness of someone's heart? I don't think so. Whose toes did H manage to step on this time?"

"I don't know," Foley said earnestly. "I didn't know he'd stepped on anyone's toes. I'm just here to do a technical audit. Really."

"Sure you are," Speed drawled sarcastically.

Tyler tried to ignore him. "Sure," he said, allowing himself to sound every bit as skeptical as his subconscious apparently felt. "Because it's not like we have a guy come around with a clip board every year to make sure we've recorded all our purchases and upgrades."

"Hey," Foley said placatingly, "I'm just the tech support. I guess I'm here so that I can ask intelligent questions, like why you haven't upgraded this machine to XP?"

"Because they haven't released an XP-compatible version of VideoDesk yet," Tyler replied.

Foley blinked. "Have you talked to any of the other software vendors?" he asked. "I've been hearing good things about the latest version of Director's Cut, and I'm pretty sure that's out for XP and Mac."

And like that they were off. Tyler wasn't by any means a computer geek except in a couple of very specialised areas, but he knew enough to get that Foley genuinely was. Tyler could just about hold his own in the argument about whether he needed more memory or a faster processor more urgently, using the time-stamp matching problem that was still outstanding on his desk as a typical example of the more mechanical things he had to do. He definitely won his point about viewing security video for useful evidence being an intuitive thing that no one was ever going to write good algorithms for, no matter how much he loved his enhancement tools. And he was pleasantly surprised that Foley didn't try to dictate what he ought or ought not to do, just asked questions and occasionally offered alternatives that Tyler might want to try out some time.

He had to force himself to be more friendly and positive than he really wanted to be, given everything that was preying on his mind, but that wasn't so hard. Just being friendly at all seemed to get him a long way with Foley, and the younger man's eagerness and enthusiasm were infectious. Besides, Speed stood there the whole time watching Foley like a hawk, a suspicious glower on his face. It was immensely reassuring to Tyler somehow.

It was only when he glanced at his watch and noticed that it was nearly lunchtime that Tyler remembered that he hadn't yet run the plates of the van that had driven away from him and Summers the previous evening. He couldn't do that with Foley hanging round, and he was due to meet up with Summers again for lunch.

"That's pretty much all of the specialist stuff," he told Foley, wondering whether he'd be able to pass the kid off onto Valera and escape intact.

Foley didn't seem inclined to move. "What about the non-specialist stuff?" he asked. "What do you need for that?"

Tyler shrugged. "A decent browser and a secure internet connection is about it," he said. "You'd be surprised how far you can get with just Google. Aside from that, I sometimes run license plates, and even that's form-based these days." It was also an opportunity, he thought. "Here, let me show you."

He brought up his standard connection to the vehicle license database, typed in the plate number that he'd carefully memorised and added the basic type and model of the van. "This is one I ran yesterday," he explained, carefully casual. Foley wasn't going to know it wasn't, after all. "Now I just submit it," he said suiting actions to words, "and wait. All the work's done at the server end."

"Uh-huh," Foley agreed. "Not exactly stressful for your box. How long does it normally take?"

The computer obligingly beeped and popped up the vehicle information. "Not long," Tyler said with a smile. He clicked on the Print button and retrieved the page that emerged from his desk printer. "Voila!"

Foley looked at him curiously. "You print everything?"

"ADAs get very nervous when you can't put every last piece of evidence in front of them," Tyler told him, "and it's easier to keep everything together as paper. I just pass it all on to whichever CSI's got the case and let them decide whether to file it or not."

It was Foley's turn to glance at his watch. "Oh," he said. "Are you doing anything for lunch? I feel like I owe you for taking up half of your morning."

"Sorry, I can't," Tyler told him, trying to sound more sincere than he really felt. "I arranged to have lunch with someone I haven't seen since we were in school together, and, well, you know. Sorry about that, James."

"Jake."

"Huh?"

"My name is Jake. You called me James."

"Oh. Sorry, I'm usually pretty good with names." Maybe whoever it was that Foley reminded him of was a 'James', Tyler wondered. "Anyway, how about I get someone else to take you out for lunch, maybe show you round Miami for a bit?"

Tyler looked hopefully out of his lab as Foley made disappointed-sounding noises. As luck would have it, he spotted exactly the person he was after. He stuck his head out of the door and called out, "Hey, Valera? Want to take a cute guy out to lunch?"


	4. Chapter 4

Summers was already seated on the terrace and sipping at an iced coffee when Tyler got to the café. He smiled and sat down next to her, signalling a waitress as he did so. "Sorry I'm late."

"No biggie," Summers said with a smile. "Did you...?"

The rest of her question was cut off as the waitress came over. The young girl managed to make a real production of taking Tyler's usual lunch order of coffee and salad, practically ignoring Summers as she did so. She finished up solicitously making sure that Tyler's every need was tended to, then walked off giving him a big smile. It was all very impressive right up to the moment that she tripped over another customer.

"Someone's jealous," Summers said, trying not to smirk too obviously.

"Good to see the girls still fall for you," Tim said wryly.

Tyler glared at them both. That won him an odd look from Summers, so he pushed a sheet of printout over to her. "Here's the license details of the van," he said. "Sorry I haven't had time to see if the owner's got a record; it's been that kind of morning."

"Tell me about it," Summers said feelingly. She frowned at the sheet briefly before turning back to Tyler. "All my leads seem to have dried up, and there's been no sign of Baldy all morning. Unless you've had a brilliant idea, all I've got left is chasing after this van."

When Tyler didn't immediately reply, she looked up hopefully. "You have had a brilliant idea?"

"No, I... I looked up the records of Tim's death this morning, and they don't make sense. According to them, Tim's gun jammed because it wasn't cleaned, but I remember him cleaning it two nights earlier."

"I told you," Tim put in quickly, "guns get dirty all the time."

"Maybe they made a mistake?" Summers suggested.

Tyler gave her a look. "Calleigh doesn't make mistakes like that," he said flatly. "Besides, weren't you the one who said it probably wasn't an accident?"

"That wasn't exactly what I was thinking of," Summers admitted.

"Then what were you thinking of?" Tyler snapped. He regretted it almost immediately. "Sorry," he said tiredly, "but it just doesn't make any sense. I watched Speed clean that gun."

Summers patted his hand consolingly. "I can see how that would make for a bear of a morning."

"And on top of that I've been playing host to an outside technical advisor. Who's good, but so not what I need right now."

"Ouch."

"And who's lurking by the door, trying to look inconspicuous," Tim said, looking back towards the interior of the cafe.

Tyler buried his head in his hands. "Apparently he's decided to follow me to lunch," he said. He looked around to see Foley standing by the cafe doorway, looking a little startled. "Sorry about this," he murmured to Summers, then waved.

Foley waved back hesitantly, then came over to them. "Hi," he said uncertainly.

"I thought Valera was taking you out to lunch?" Tyler asked.

"She got paged, something about a rush job. Oh, uh, coffee please. And do you do sandwiches?" Foley asked as the waitress reappeared with Tyler's lunch. The girl looked much happier as she seated him next to Summers and took his order.

"So," Summers said, looking narrowly at Foley, "tech support, huh?"

"Uh, yeah. And you are?"

That was his cue, Tyler thought. "This is Buffy Summers, an old friend of mine from high school." Stretching a point, he thought, but it saved on the explanations. "Buffy, this is James Foley."

"Jake," Foley said pointedly.

"Sorry, I don't know why I keep calling you that."

Summers snapped her fingers, looking pleased with herself. "I think I do. Do you have any family in California?"

"What?" Foley looked startled, understandably in Tyler's opinion. "No, I don't. Well, my mother's family moved from California, but that's it."

"Her name wouldn't have been Stanley, would it?"

"Uh, why?"

"There was a James Stanley in the Sunnydale Class of '55. I came across a picture of him in the class yearbook, and you look just like him. I'm guessing he was a great uncle or something?"

Foley's face was a picture, and Tyler couldn't help but grin. Then a thought occurred to him and he frowned again. "That explains why you recognise him, but I never looked through the old yearbooks."

Summers froze. Just for a moment, and Tyler might not even have noticed if he hadn't been keyed up with Foley around. Then she shrugged. "Oh well, it was a good theory," she said innocently.

"Uh-huh," Tyler said, unconvinced. "So what aren't you telling me?"

It was Speed's turn to smile. "Keep this up," he murmured, "and Horatio will be making you a CSI too."

"You don't want to know," Summers told him. Her gaze flicked across to Foley. "Really, you don't want to know."

Sunnydale business, Tyler translated to himself. No, he really didn't want to know. He nodded, trying to think of something to change the subject to.

"I want to know," Foley said unexpectedly. He looked upset, and Tyler couldn't really blame him. "You can't say something like that, tell me that you know something about my family, and expect me to let it go."

"I should have kept my mouth shut, shouldn't I?" Summers said ruefully. "Trust me, you aren't going to thank me for telling you this."

Foley just glared at her. It suddenly struck Tyler as odd; Foley had spent the morning carefully dancing round him, always avoiding confronting him head on, yet here he was doing a pretty good impression of an immovable object in front of Summers, of all people.

Summers sighed. "Stanley was doing a Mrs Robinson with his English teacher. Eventually she decided to break it off, the night of the Sadie Hawkins Dance..."

Her voice started blurring in Tyler's ears. He could see the scene, James standing there, confronting the woman he loved. He could feel the confusion and heartbreak, the rising anger and denial. He remembered the words, "A person doesn't just wake up and stop loving somebody," feel the revolver in his hand...

"Ty!"

"'M okay!" Tyler jerked back to the present to find Tim shouting in his ear and the others staring at him. Foley was looking a little wild-eyed himself, but Summers had a sad, knowing look on her face.

"Love is forever," she said quietly.

Every word rang in Tyler's memory, impossibly. How could he know those were James Stanley's next words? How could he know anything about this whole thing, never mind remember it as if he had been the one there having his heart broken? "But... but that's impossible."

"I wish," Summers told him with feeling.

"But how...? And why me?"

"Blind luck." Summers sighed again. "And if it makes you feel any better, you weren't the only one. Just be glad you stopped before anything bad happened."

Meaning before the gun went off and he would have killed Tracy and himself, Tyler thought, going cold despite the bright sunshine. As if he didn't have enough reasons to hate guns.

"Ty, you're officially freaking me out here," Speed said, crouching close beside Tyler. "What's going on?"

"What are you two talking about?" Foley said in an unknowing echo.

"Do you believe in ghosts, Mr Foley?" Summers asked.

"What? No, why?"

"Then I don't have a good explanation for you."

"Ghosts?" Tyler asked weakly. "But that's impossible."

"Hey, sitting here," Tim said, affronted. Tyler ignored him.

"Blame it on a gas leak and forget about it," Summers suggested.

"Is it still... I mean, is anyone else in danger?"

"No." Summers' look was unreadable. "She forgave him."

Tyler understood, somehow. James hadn't meant to shoot the woman he loved, that was why he'd cracked up and shot himself. He didn't know how Summers had managed it, and from the look of her he didn't want to know either, but somehow she'd got through to James.

"What?" Foley asked disbelievingly, breaking back into Tyler's impossible memories. "You're telling me that someone who's been dead for fifty years talked someone else who's been dead for fifty years into actually being dead? Do you realise how nuts that sounds?"

"Welcome to my life," Summers said deadpan. "Seriously, you'll be a lot happier just forgetting I said anything. Most folks are. Go back to being a technical advisor for... who did you say you worked for?"

"I didn't," Foley said far too quickly, rapidly pulling himself back together after his near freak-out. "I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to tell you. Heck, I'm not even sure I'm supposed to be telling the people I'm advising."

Tyler pasted on a fake smile. "I think my boss must have annoyed someone higher up the food chain again," he said easily. He didn't actually believe that any more, not given the way Foley seemed to be hanging around him specifically. Not, particularly, after finding out that the guy was related to something that nearly killed him in high school. As a forensics lab tech Tyler wasn't a great believer in coincidences, particularly not this many coincidences at once.

"Ah," Summers said knowingly. "Alphabet soup, then. Look on the bright side; he's not military, it can't go all that wrong."

"What's wrong with the military?" Somehow Foley didn't sound at all mollified by that crack.

"Individually, nothing. I even dated a marine for a year," Summers said, a little wistfully, rubbing the back of her neck. "It's just going up the chain of command I've seen lemmings with more sense of self-preservation, and everyone's got this real thing about obeying their orders." She paused. "Well, I suppose according to Andrew those weren't technically lemmings, but it was all totally his fault in the first place. Anyway, trust me, the whole military thing was a bit of a disaster."

"You worked with the military?" Tyler asked disbelievingly. He just couldn't square the image of the determinedly independent and irreverent Buffy Summers having anything to do with anything as regimented as the army.

Summers waggled a hand. "I worked with them, they worked with me, it was all one big mess." She rubbed the back of her neck again, and Tyler was surprised to see Foley rub his neck as well.

"Are you two OK?" Tyler asked.

"Just itchy," Foley said stiffly.

"You know that feeling you get when you're sure someone's watching you?" Summers asked meaningfully.

"Don't look around," Tim said quickly, and started doing just that.

It took a lot of willpower to stop Tyler craning his head around, but he managed it. "Like yesterday?" he asked Summers, noticing that both she and Foley were checking reflections in any shiny objects nearby. He quietly did the same.

"There," Tim said. "Don't point this time, but we've got a new audience with the same tattoo. He's about forty yards to your left, by the alleyway."

"Thank God," Summers muttered after Tyler relayed the information. "I can do the meaningful conversations, but I'm much happier being action girl." She paused for a moment, thinking. "I'm going to walk into the cafe like I'm going to use the ladies' room. Give me two minutes to get round to the alley, then do the point and shout routine like you did yesterday. And Tyler, don't do anything stupid like chasing him on your own, OK?" She smiled easily, took a sip from her coffee, then stood and walked into the building, leaving Tyler and Foley staring at each other uneasily.

"What the hell is going on?" Foley asked eventually. "Why is there someone watching us?"

Tyler looked at him carefully. Foley looked as young and nerdy as you'd expect a computer geek to be, but Summers had joked about him being an intelligence agent and to be honest that was one of the few answers that made any sense to Tyler. There was an unexpected strength to Foley, a way he was overly casual with Tyler, and of course the heavy hints that Horatio had dropped.

"Why don't you tell me?" he asked. "You've been watching me all morning, after all."

Tim looked round sharply. "Be careful," he said urgently. "If he's dangerous..."

Foley looked anything but dangerous. Instead he looked young, confused maybe, earnest, and just that little bit guilty to Tyler's trained eye. "Um, no? Really, I just got assigned to do a technical audit, that's all." He was cut off by the sound of his cellphone ringing. "Saved by the bell," Tyler heard him mutter.

"Hey, Lou. No, I was... what!" Foley shot an unreadable glance at Tyler, and a more worried one over his shoulder in the direction that Summers had gone off in. "I'm supposed to what? But... Yeah, I guess." He winced at the sudden increase in volume from his phone, and Tyler briefly wished he could hear what was being said as more than an angry buzzing. "I mean, yes ma'am. Hoo-rah," Foley added as a sarcastic afterthought, marine-style.

Snapping his phone closed, he looked over at Tyler and sighed. "She said about two minutes, didn't she?"

"Uh, yes." Tyler didn't quite know what to make of that conversation, except that Foley hadn't particularly liked whatever news it was that he'd got. "Who was that?"

"My boss. It's the bald guy by the alley we're after?"

"Yes."

Foley rolled his eyes heavenward for a moment. "Why me?" he asked no one in particular.

"Why not?" Tim replied cheerfully. Tyler forbore to pass on the comment.

"OK," Foley said decisively, and stood up. "Here goes nothing." He turned and sprinted in the direction of their startled stalker.

Caught on the hop, it took Tyler a couple of seconds to get out of his chair and give chase himself. He might as well not have bothered; not only did Foley pull away from him as easily as Summers had yesterday, but as the watcher turned and fled past the alleyway, a dainty arm reached out and yanked the unfortunate man in. Summers had been ready and waiting.

"Is someone putting steroids in the water?" Tim asked.


	5. Chapter 5

Tyler finally reached the alley and was treated to the sight of little Buffy Summers pinning their bald-headed watcher up against the wall one-handed as a grim Jake Foley looked on. "...And you're going to tell me where," she was saying as the man struggled ineffectually.

Tyler stared at him. Medium height and thickly built, he was making no impression on Summers at all. More importantly, there was no sign of any tattoos on him, never mind the unmissably huge one that the man in the Montgomery's pool area had had. "Are you sure we've got the right guy?" he asked.

"He's the right guy," Foley said confidently. "He ran."

"You really can't see the tattoo?" Tim asked. He looked from the bald man to Tyler, who nodded while the man blustered something about thinking they were muggers. "But you could see the tattoo on the video footage?" Tyler nodded again. Tim frowned, obviously thinking hard. "Have you got a camera with you?"

Tyler caught Tim's meaning. It was insane, the very idea of a tattoo that only showed up on cameras. Then again, he was listening to Tim at all, and that was pretty insane. He lifted his cellphone and took a snap with the built-in camera. Then he stared at it for a good ten seconds before he dared to speak.

"He's our guy." He turned the phone display around to the others, showing them a beautifully clear picture of their captive sporting the eagle tattoo across his face.

Foley stared at it incredulously, but Summers just smacked her forehead with her free hand. "Duh," she said, "Willow's going to rag me for weeks for not thinking of that. So Mr I'm-so-innocent-I'm-wearing-a-concealment-spell, are you going to tell me what I want to know or am I going to put you in the hospital?"

The man's face hardened. "We were warned about you and yours, Slayer," he said, his whole manner now different.

"Nice to know my reputation precedes me," Summers said.

"You can't stop us. We know about the Mercian Prophecies; we know only one person could have stopped the rise of Lord Azrafel. He is dead."

Tyler suddenly felt cold. "And you want to take the credit for that, too," he grated out.

"None of us pulled the trigger," the man said with a superior sneer. "All we had to do was encourage his job to kill him. A little curse to make his equipment fail when he most needed it, and a few months' patience was all we needed."

It doesn't matter if I believe it, Tyler thought numbly, recalling what Summers had told him yesterday. It only matters that they believe it. "You killed him," he said hoarsely, then he was launching himself at the man and screaming. "You bastard, you killed him."

Foley caught him before his wild swipes actually connected with the man, holding him back with relative ease. "Woah," he said, "wait til we've got the information before beating him to a pulp."

Tyler barely heard him. It was only the sight of Tim standing between him and his prey, yelling at him about how this wasn't going to put the guy away and keep him there, that stopped him swinging. The fear for Tyler written all over Tim's face was too much for him. "You are going down," he snarled eventually.

His target actually smirked at that, though Summers wiped that off his face by slamming him back into the wall. "You are going to tell me where and when your friends are doing this Azzie-fellow ritual, or I swear I'm going to find a demon somewhere around here and feed you to it feet first!"

"You're too late, Slayer. Do your worst; you'll get nothing out of me. The Eagle King will rise..."

"And all shall bow before him, yeah, yeah, heard it all before. Do you cultist guys have to take classes in being pompous blow-hards before they let you in or something?" Summers looked frustrated, though, and Tyler had a sick feeling that she knew even better than he did how hard it was to get information out of a fanatic.

"Maybe his friends in the getaway van will be more helpful?" he suggested.

"There's more of them around?" Foley scanned the alleyway quickly and much too professionally for Tyler's comfort.

"Yesterday's eagle eye had friends around the corner," Summers told him. She looked torn between going after them herself and keeping a hold of her current playmate.

"OK," Foley said slowly, "a van full of religious fanatics, I should be able to cope with that." He headed back out of the alley.

Tyler took one last look at Summers effortlessly pinning down a man several inches taller than herself, and hurried after Foley. If anyone needed help, it wasn't going to be Summers. Not that he'd be much help, but punching one of these nuts might make him feel better.

Unfortunately, the van had already pulled out into the traffic by the time Tyler got there, and Foley was left standing on the sidewalk, staring at it as if he could stop it just by glaring and swearing quietly. "Old model," Tyler heard him mutter, "no fuel injection system. Well, they won't be telling us anything."

"Oh, I don't know," Tim said. Tyler turned to see him looking thoughtfully up at the traffic cameras overhead.

******

They had wasted precious time arguing with the duty officer about why they wanted their watcher held. Tyler had been on the point of appealing to Horatio, not that would have done any good, when Foley pulled out some ID, told them to book the guy for impeding a federal investigation, and if there was any more argument the desk sergeant would be joining him.

Now they were back in the A/V lab, and Tyler had worked himself back into a cold fury as he tracked the van intersection by intersection. Foley was seated nearby, working away at another computer while Tim watched him carefully, and Summers was pacing back and forth, talking animatedly into her phone.

"Yeah, Giles," she was saying, "the guy definitely said it was Azzie-fellow."

"Azrafel," the others corrected without looking up.

"Whatever. So what are they going to need for this ritual of theirs?"

While she was listening, Foley spoke up. "Finally. I've got an ID for our stalker off his fingerprints. He's a Leon Carrel, last worked as a cleaner for the University of Miami but quit a month ago."

"What are his prints doing on IAFIS?" Tyler asked, not looking up from his screen.

"I wasn't using IAFIS." Foley typed some more, then paused.

"OK, that's freaky," Tim said. Tyler looked up to see Foley concentrating hard, then smile to himself and start typing again. He raised an enquiring eyebrow when Tim glanced over. "This guy's got some serious hacking skills. He just broke into the University's personnel files in three seconds flat."

Tyler looked at Foley with renewed respect and not a little worry. He knew just enough about computers to know how difficult that sort of thing was supposed to be, and Foley wasn't even using his own machine, just one of the regular lab computers.

"Looks like three other people quit in the same week," Foley said after a moment. "An assistant librarian, an anthropology lecturer and another cleaner. I'll see if I can find a link to your van owner."

"Not a good combination," Summers said, snapping her phone closed as she moved to look over Foley's shoulder. "Librarians are always the dangerous ones, and you never want to trust an anthropologist." Both Foley and Tyler looked at her, but she didn't elaborate.

"So," she said before the silence got too uncomfortable. "What are you really doing here, Mr NSA-agent-doing-computer-advice?"

Foley sighed. "Let's just say that the next time you're talking about nut cults on the phone, try not to sound like you're planning to assassinate the President." When Buffy continued to look at him blankly, he added, "'Seek to bring down the Eagle', lots of blood and darkness, something like that?"

"You heard that?" Tyler asked, remembering that first call he'd made to Summers's cellphone.

"A bunch of computers heard that, decided it had enough keywords in it and booted it up to a human to worry about. And here I am."

"I didn't think the government was supposed to tap phone lines without a warrant," Summers said, clearly unhappy.

"Oops?" Foley said innocently. Then his face hardened. "What I want to know is who you are, Buffy Summers. 'Slayer' is a funny kind of nickname for a 'historical researcher'." Foley stared at her challengingly, having made the quotes around Summers's nominal job title pretty obvious.

Summers grimaced. "Why do the bad guys always have to rant like that?" she asked no one in particular. "Look, can we just say that I'm here to take down those cultists and ignore the rest of it? Trust me, you really don't want to know."

That hadn't worked with Foley last time, and it didn't seem like it was going to work this time either. "When my boss gets a phone call from the President telling her to lay off investigating and, and I quote, 'offer any and all assistance you require,' I kind of want to know what I've been dropped in."

"The President?" Summers asked in shock. "The president knows about... um... me?"

"You mean you don't have him on speed-dial?" Foley snarked.

Summers spent a moment visibly pulling herself together. "I'm going to kill Giles when I get home," she said. "He has to have known about that." Foley continued to stare at her. "Alright, alright, just remember I told you you weren't going to like this.

"There's a whole spiel that goes with this, but I can never be bothered to remember it. Basically, all those things in the fairy stories — the ghosts, the vampires, the demons — they're all real. Aside from leprechauns, but personally I'm reserving judgement on that. Me, I'm the one that gives them nightmares.

"Those cultists I'm after? It's not just because they're mean and think they made a gun jam by remote control. They really are trying to summon up a fifth circle demon and cause a lot of death and destruction. And sorry, Tyler, but they could well have made that gun jam by remote control."

Tyler closed his eyes against the pain for a moment. "Seriously?" Foley asked, and Tyler couldn't blame him for sounding skeptical.

Summers shrugged. "I've seen a cheerleader cursed to spontaneously combust. How much harder can it be to make accidents happen?"

Foley shook his head. "Look," he said, "you don't have to tell me what's going on if you don't want to, but making up all this stuff isn't going to help."

"Aren't you forgetting the tattoo that only shows up on cameras?"

"Oh come on, that's not a hard bit of image manipulation."

"On a phone camera?"

"Belonging to the crime lab's A/V expert?"

Summers looked over to Tyler for help. Tyler considered it idly as he tracked the van through another intersection. "I could probably figure out how to do it," he said after a moment, "but I didn't."

It was pretty clear from his body language that Foley didn't believe that for a minute. Another time, that would have annoyed the hell out of Tyler. Right now he didn't care; Tim's killers, or at least the psychos that Tyler could blame for his death, were much more important.

"You're taking this awfully calmly," Foley said.

Tyler shrugged. "It makes sense of a lot of the things that happened while I was growing up," he said evenly. He paused, then added, "I do have one question though."

"Yes?"

"Fifth circle demon?"

"Big, mean, and capable of a lot of property damage before we can hit it with an anti-tank gun," Summers told him. "Assuming that works."

Tyler considered that for a moment, then decided that thinking about it too much right now was a waste of his time. "OK," he said, and turned back to his computer.

"How are you doing, Tyler?" Summers asked. From her tone, she wasn't talking about following the cultists' van through Miami.

"I'm OK." The lie was obvious even to Tyler's ears, so he wasn't surprised when both Summers and Tim called him on it.

"No, you're not," Tim said, suddenly crouched beside Tyler.

Meanwhile Summers put a consoling hand on his shoulder. "It's OK", she said softly. "I know how hard it must be for you having all of this dragged up again."

"I'll be OK," Tyler amended stubbornly. "I'm not going to crack up until after we've got these guys."

"You're not going to crack up then, either," Tim said while Summers gave Tyler a long, measuring stare. He reached out to Tyler, then pulled his hand away with a grimace before they could touch. "I'm still here for you." It took all Tyler's remaining willpower not to laugh out loud at having a figment of his imagination try to reassure him he wasn't going crazy.

"Revenge isn't all it's cracked up to be," Summers said, and suddenly Tyler didn't feel like laughing at all. "Remember how it all went wrong for James?"

Tyler felt his vision blurring as he stared fixedly at the screen. Revenge hadn't really been what was on that James Stanley's mind when he went after his ex-girlfriend, and when he'd got it by accident he'd committed suicide. Still, revenge was all that Tyler had right now, whether it turned out to be clean and legal or just getting Summers to beat the bastards to a pulp. "We haven't got time for this," he said, wiping his eyes with his knuckles. "I'll live."

No one said anything for a long time. Eventually Summers cleared her throat. "So, how are you doing with the van?" she asked.

"I've lost them," Tyler said with a sigh. "I'm just checking to see if they've used a side-street to double back, but given the way they've been driving I don't think they did. We've just run out of cameras."

"Where?" Foley asked.

Tyler obligingly put the route he'd been tracing up on the projection monitor. "They didn't come through this intersection," he said, highlighting a spot after the end of the route, "so they're somewhere in this area."

"I'll cross-reference with our suspects," Foley said, typing quickly, "see if anything comes up related to them in there." A few moments later he was grinning. "Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. This is the place our van-driver last worked, before it went bust." Tyler's map was replaced on the monitor with an aerial photograph of an industrial unit. "Does that look like somewhere your cultists might hide out?"

Summers nodded. "Giles said they'd need somewhere fairly big to do the ritual, and that looks about right." She paused, looking askance at Foley. "You got that off a spy satellite?" she asked.

"No, Google Earth."


	6. Chapter 6

"There's the van," Tyler said. It was parked beside the building they guessed the cultists were hiding in, right out in plain sight. It wasn't as if the cultists knew there was any reason to hide it, Tyler reflected; if Summers hadn't had him helping her, she would only have come across it by sheer chance.

"Drive on past," Foley said urgently. "Take a left at the end of the block and then pull up. We don't want to let them know we're here."

"Like those bozos seem to care," Summers said. Tyler couldn't disagree; the cultists they'd caught seemed to be supremely confident that no one could stop them. "Still, I'm all for the stealthy and subtle approach," she said as Foley glared at her.

Obediently, Tyler drove past, ignoring the bickering from the back seat as he had for most of the journey. Both Summers and Foley had tried to stop him coming along, claiming that they didn't want him getting hurt. He had stubbornly refused to be left behind while they went after the people who claimed to have killed Tim. It helped that he was the only one of them to have a car; Foley had taken a taxi from the airport that morning, and Summers muttered something about her boss refusing to accept responsibility for her driving a rental car.

"They're like a couple of eight-year-olds," Tim grumbled from the front seat the pair had argued over until Tyler made them both sit in the back.

"At least they haven't gotten sick and thrown up all over the interior," Tyler muttered quietly.

"Hey," Summers and Foley said simultaneously. Tyler made a mental note to be more quiet around them.

Around the corner, Tyler pulled up and parked the car. Summers tapped him on the shoulder as he went to unbuckle his seat belt.

"Stay in the car, Tyler," she said firmly. "I mean it. I don't want anyone getting hurt here, and I'm nervous enough about taking one newbie into this."

Said newbie gave Summers a venomous look, but kept his mouth shut for once. Tyler merely nodded, then got out of the car anyway.

"I'm serious; don't make me knock you out and lock you in your own car."

"And what happens if one of these nuts comes out and finds him unconscious?" Foley said unexpectedly. "Face it, he's going to come whether you want him to or not. Wouldn't you rather have him where you can see him, instead of getting himself killed where you can't help?"

Summers growled in frustration. "Now I know how Giles felt," she muttered. "Alright, you can come. But you stay behind us," she continued before Tyler could begin to thank her, "you keep your head down, and you stay out of the fight. Got that?"

"Got it," Tyler confirmed happily. He just wanted to see these guys taken down. He owed it to Tim.

"Be careful," Tim said urgently. "If you manage to get yourself killed too... just be careful."

That wiped the smile off Tyler's face. He fell in beside Foley as the three of them walked back to the cultists' building. "Thanks," he said quietly. Foley just smiled and nodded back. "Why did you do that?"

Foley shrugged. "It's not so long since I was you," he said. "Uh, metaphorically speaking, that is. Having someone not even trusting me to back him up, never mind actually handle a gun... You have got a gun, haven't you?"

Tyler's department-issue pistol was somewhere back in the lab. He hadn't seen it for months, even before Tim's death. His expression must have given him away, because Foley rolled his eyes and drew his own gun.

"Here," he said, slapping the gun into Tyler's hand. "Try not to have to use it. That's the safety; leave it on and you won't accidentally shoot anyone."

"Aren't you going to need that?" Summers asked, slowing to a walk beside them.

Foley shook his head. "No," he said, "I'll be fine."

"These guys aren't going to come quietly," Summers pointed out. "They're fanatics. We'll have to take them all down before they'll give up."

"I've been on the wrong end of a Spec Ops unit before now; I'll survive. Besides, I'd rather not use my gun if I don't have to."

"If you say so," Summers said dubiously. "I know what you mean about the guns, though. They always seem to complicate things."

"So why am I carrying one again?" Tyler asked.

"Because you need it," the other two told him.

They reached the building, and examined it for a moment. "No security cameras," Foley observed. "Either they don't care or they're very confident of their security."

Summers was looking at the front door, a big wide vehicle port covered by heavy shutters firmly padlocked to the ground. "Easy enough to break open," she said, "but those shutters will make a lot of noise."

"And we'd still have to get through the doors behind them," Tyler pointed out.

"Oh, those big doors are never as thick as they look. Except on European castles, which is not a mistake I'm going to repeat in a hurry."

Tyler and Foley looked at her incredulously, but she didn't elaborate. "Let's look for something quieter, OK?" Foley eventually suggested.

The lower windows on the industrial unit were all disappointingly small and frosted, but around the back they came across another door.

"Heavy security door," Summers said disappointedly. "I can't break that down in a hurry. Does your technical wizardry extend to dealing with things like that?" she asked Tyler, pointing to a keypad beside the door.

"Not really," Tyler admitted. He squatted beside Foley as they both peered at the keypad. "There's no swipe card at least, but we still need to play 'guess the four digit number' to get in." He looked around, hoping to see a security camera on a nearby building that might just have seen someone typing the code in. No such luck.

"You can see which keys have got prints on them, cut the combinations down," Tim suggested.

"Good idea," Foley said when Tyler passed that on. He seemed to be concentrating hard on the device. "The big problem is that it's wired up to the alarm system."

That was well out of Tyler's league, and he said as much. Summers sighed. "I guess I'd better start looking at the upper windows, then. They always forget to secure those."

There was a click. "Or you could use the door," Foley said smugly, opening it a crack to peek in.

Tyler looked at the keypad that Foley hadn't even touched. "How the hell...?" he asked. Foley just smiled and slipped inside, leaving Tyler and Summers looking at each other in bewilderment.

Inside proved to be a short corridor. Tyler drew his gun, making sure to leave the safety on, and pointed it at the ceiling for added safety. Which appeared to be the wrong thing to do, given the look on Tim's face. "What?" Tyler mouthed.

"Point it at the floor," Tim said, miming pointing the gun down and slightly to the front and left. "You can bring it up and fire faster than you can bring it down and fire."

Foley looked back and nodded appreciatively when he saw Tyler re-orientate the gun. He stopped where two doors faced each other across the corridor, a short distance before it ended in another door, and looked quizzically at Summers. The two of them did some intense hand-waving of the sort Tyler normally only saw in action movies, which puzzled him until he remembered Summers saying something about dating a marine. Apparently it really did mean something, because moments later Summers turned to him and whispered, "If someone comes through the end door, scream and run."

Before Tyler could retort that he had a gun damn it, he didn't need to run and there would be no screaming either, Foley and Summers vanished silently through the two doors. That left Tyler alone in the corridor, except for Tim who wasn't really there, and suddenly it was a whole different business. Somewhere in the building there were demon-summoning mad cultists, and the two people who actually knew what they were doing had disappeared on him.

"What's going on," he whispered.

"I don't know," Tim whispered back, even though no one else could hear him. "Something's up; I can kind of feel it. My skin feels all itchy."

Tyler gulped and backed up a little, bringing the gun up to point at the door. Now that Tim mentioned it, he could feel a vague prickling sensation running up and down his arms. It was probably psychosomatic, or at least that was what he hoped. "Do you think that means—?"

Foley emerged swiftly and silently from the side door, and Tyler was abruptly very glad that he'd forgotten to release the safety catch. He hastily pointed the gun back at the floor and concentrated on getting his heart rate back under control as Summers too reappeared.

"Clear," Foley reported.

"Mine too," Summers whispered back.

"What was in there?" Tyler asked, not quite sure he wanted to know the answer given what the nuts they were after thought they were doing.

Foley gave him a weird look. "What do you expect to be in a rest room?" he asked. Tyler belatedly noticed the signs on the doors, and felt his cheeks flame with embarrassment.

Summers shook her head. "As bad as Xander," she muttered before ghosting up to the end door.

At the end of the corridor, Tyler could just make out some sort of rhythmic noise coming from beyond the door. Summers listened closely for a moment, then looked grim. "They've started the ritual," she muttered. "That means we probably haven't got long. Giles wasn't real specific about the ceremony, but he said it was pretty short. Apparently it's all the preparations that take time and effort, making a blessed sword at the dark of the moon and all that."

"Blessed sword?" Foley's whisper managed to sound incredulous.

"And all that?" Tyler asked more pointedly, hoping for some specifics to work on.

"I don't know," Summers whispered defensively. "I tune out when he gets all technical on me."

Foley listened intently at the door, and shook his head. "Whatever they're doing, they're doing it in a foreign language. It doesn't sound like anything I've ever heard before."

"Probably Sumerian," Summers told him. "For some reason that's really popular with demon summoners.

"OK, here's what we do. I'll go for the head honcho, try to stop him before he can finish his thing. You," she pointed to Foley, "keep the cultists off my back as much as you can. If you get a chance to disturb their ritual stuff, take it; at the very least you'll piss them off enough to give me a chance. You," she pointed at Tyler, and hesitated. "Keep your head down. Too many people get killed trying to help me out as it is; I don't need you going all wild bunch too."

Tyler thought about protesting that Foley got to back her up, but not too hard. Being left alone in the corridor just for that one minute had scared the bejeesus out of him enough to appreciate just how far Summers was going in letting him tag along at all.

"If we're too late and Azrafel shows up," Summers continued, turning back to Foley, "get the hell out of there. According to Giles he always shows up with lots of minions, but no one seemed too clear on what they were like. We'll need serious backup, and they'll need to know what they're facing. Got that?" Foley and Tyler nodded. "Right. Three, two, one..."

They burst into a large open room lit by high windows and a number of big, yellow, smokey candles. Robed and tattooed cultists stood around a big circle on the floor, most of them turning and gaping at the intruders.

"Hi," Summers said brightly, "I love what you've done with the decor."

"Stop them!" shouted the guy on the far side of the circle. Probably the big cheese, Tyler thought; he certainly had the most ornate robes, and he was standing behind a separate smaller circle with a lot of bits and pieces that must mean something to the ceremony, most notably a sword that seemed to have been driven a short way into the floor.

The whole thing rapidly became too chaotic for Tyler to follow. The cultists started lumbering towards them, only to discover that Summers and Foley, twin blurs of speed, were already amongst them wreaking havoc. Tyler hung back and raised his gun, hoping to dissuade the few who were coming after him. They didn't hesitate any more than their boss, who was now chanting some incomprehensible gibberish at the top of his voice.

Tyler swore, squeezed the trigger, and swore again when he realised he still hadn't flipped the safety off. Then it was too late; his two attackers crashed into him, sending them all to the floor in a tangle of limbs and the gun skittering away across the floor. He heard Tim call his name in panic and tried to struggle free, but he didn't have the bulk to push either of them off and he couldn't wriggle out from under both. The best he could do was to keep twisting and pushing, trying to keep them from landing too many blows.

Then suddenly the weight lifted off him. Tyler looked up rather muzzily to see Foley holding a cultist in either hand. First one, then the other was thrown across the room to land in a dazed heap against the opposite wall. "Keep your head down," Foley advised him, then he was off again to take down a bunch who were trying to rush Summers from behind.

Tyler took the advice to heart, and crawled behind a packing crate where he hoped he wouldn't be noticed. He thought briefly about searching for the gun, but he wasn't sure where exactly it had gone, and it hadn't done him much good anyway.

"Not exactly fun and games, is it?" Tim asked from beside him, scaring another ten years off Tyler's life.

"Don't do that!" he hissed, peering out from behind the crate. What he saw was incredible, almost more ballet than combat. Summers and Foley were moving with amazing speed, blocking blows and weaving and twisting so that their opponents got in each others' way more than they could get near those two. For every cultist the pair took down there seemed to be two more to take their place, but that didn't seem to be discouraging them.

"I thought you were going after the head honcho?" Tyler heard Foley say as he ducked below a blow.

"I thought you were keeping them off me," Summers growled back. She swept the feet out from under the two cultists in front of her, used them as a springboard to jump onto the shoulders of another bad guy, and from there somersaulted into free space where she could finally have a clear run at the chanting madman.

"Keep them off, sure," Foley muttered, surging forwards in an attempt to keep the dozen or so remaining cultists busy.

Tyler felt a wind start blowing around the room just as Summers landed and started to charge the leader. Before she could take more than a step, the man finished his incantation with a great shout, and unnaturally neon blue lightning flashed from him to strike the sword and snuff out all the candles. Magic, Tyler thought numbly. He was seeing magic for real. Knowing about it, hearing Summers's explanation of what had been happening around and to him in high school, that was one thing. Seeing it with his own eyes, knowing no amount of stage effects could do what he had seen... that was another thing entirely.

"It is done," the man shouted, an insane grin plastered across his face. "The sword calls to the Lord Azrafel now; you cannot prevent his arrival."

"We'll see about that," Summers spat back. She reached for the sword hilt, and looked surprised when her hand passed straight through it. "Well, that's different," she said.

The cult leader laughed again. "It's the Eagle King's sword now, no merely physical being can wield it. But when he manifests..." He paused to give a truly chilling laugh. "Then it will kill you."

"You practised that," Summers accused incredulously, advancing on the man. "What, did you actually pay for gloating lessons or something?"

Behind her in the large circle, a shape began to appear. A translucent black smudge at first, it slowly resolved as if coming into focus, turning into a nightmare creature some nine feet high. It was humanoid, a detached bit of Tyler noted, though the proportions of the limbs were all wrong. He could see why someone had called it the Eagle King; the huge hooked beak and piercing black eyes certainly brought eagles to mind, but there was no nobility in that gaze, just cruelty and death.

Then it lumbered forward, still partially see-through, and Tyler snapped out of his daze. "Summers," he yelled, "behind you!"

Summers turned. "Oh crap," she said. "I knew I should have brought the Scythe."

"He comes!" the cultist crowed. "Rejoice, my brothers, our lord of the dark is here, and he will richly reward us for our faithfulness."

The figure reached out and plucked the sword from where it was embedded in the floor.

"Kind of a minion-free zone, though," Summers mused aloud, watching the demon warily. "Foley, get out of here."

Foley finished rewarding the last of the junior cultists with unconsciousness, and looked up to see the creature towering over Summers. "Holy..."

"Oh no, he is most unholy," the leader continued pompously. "From before mankind set foot upon this continent, he and his slaves have been working his evil upon the world. The pathetic workings of man have but slightly delayed the day of his glory, and your minuscule efforts shall not stop—"

The sword swung. Summers dropped beneath the arc, and Foley stepped back out of immediate reach. The cultist stood there as his head dropped forward and rolled gently across the floor. Then before his body got the message to collapse it came apart, torn into tiny pieces.

"He talked too much," the demon said. Its voice was like fingers screeching on a chalk board, Tyler thought; it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up and demand to be taken out of there.

Summers, typically, didn't seem all that impressed. "OK beak-face, we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way," she said.

Azrafel seemed to be amused by this. "You wish to surrender to me? Very well, I promise you a swift destruction."

"The hard way it is," Summers said, and charged. The demon lashed out at her with its sword, but Summers deftly side-stepped and launched a series of kicks and punches at it. If she had been moving quickly before, Tyler thought, she had moved up to a whole new level now. Both she and the demon were moving too fast for him to make out individual blows, and the delicate dance of earlier had given way to sheer brute power.

Unfortunately, it didn't seem to be doing Summers much good. She landed plenty of blows on Azrafel, who couldn't catch her with its sword, but the demon shrugged them off like rain. Contrary to orders, Foley stood on the sidelines, trying and failing to find a way into the fight without being skewered. Evidently he wasn't used to dealing with nine foot tall near-invulnerable slightly transparent sword-wielding maniacs, Tyler thought. Which made two of them.

"You are skilled, Slayer," Azrafel screeched, "but you will tire, while with every moment I am brought more completely into your feeble world."

"And you complained about him talking too much," Summers retorted. She kicked Azrafel's knee, actually making the monster stumble momentarily.

"I grow tired of your impertinence," Azrafel grated, and thrust sideways with its sword.

Foley, caught by surprise, didn't quite twist out of the way in time. A thin line of blood appeared on his arm as Summers yelled a belated warning. "It's OK," he said. "It's just a scratch." Then his face screwed up in surprise and pain.

"A scratch that has opened the way for hundreds of my true servants," Azrafel told him, looking as smug as something with a fixed expression can. "They will tear you apart from the inside out, Watcher, while your charge looks on. Don't worry, it won't hurt for long."

Foley shuddered in pain, then took a deep breath and stood tall. "I'll see your hundreds," he said, looking Azrafel straight in the eye, "and raise you _millions_."

Tyler looked on in amazement, and even Azrafel looked startled and took a half-step back, as a wisp of black smoke puffed out of Foley's wound with an unearthly scream, and the cut sealed itself and vanished. "How...?"

Summers didn't let a little thing like a miraculous healing throw her. "We've got a few tricks of our own these days," she said, as if she knew anything about what had just happened, and kicked Azrafel hard on the wrist. The deadly sword fell from its numbed fingers with a harsh clatter.

"Magic," Azrafel spat, attempting to sweep Summers aside with a powerful blow. "It shall not save you for long, Watcher."

"Now that's just plain insulting," Foley said, punching the demon hard enough in what should have been the kidneys to stagger it. "And stop calling me 'Watcher'."

Azrafel recovered quickly, however, and Foley was too slow to dodge its return blow. Before it could follow up, Summers was on it again. "Stop messing around and get the sword," she ordered, driving Azrafel back with a string of punches and kicks.

Foley picked himself up off the floor and shook his head dazedly. "'Stop messing around' she says. Even Lou doesn't hit me that hard." For all his complaining, Foley hurried back to the fight and stooped to scoop up the sword. Unfortunately, as Summers had earlier, he came up empty handed. "What the hell? I can't touch it now."

"Damn," Summers said, "I really should have brought the Scythe. If you've got any bright ideas, now w—"

Whatever she was about to say was cut off as Azrafel managed to grab her by the throat, but before it could do anything to her Foley brought one of the metal candle-holders down hard on its elbow. Azrafel screeched as it let go of Summers, and Tyler found himself wincing in sympathy. "Does that count?" Foley asked, swinging his improvised club some more at the demon.

"Not bad," Summers managed to gasp out as she got back to her feet.

"Why can't they pick the sword up?" Tyler asked. He ducked reflexively as Azrafel caught hold of the candle-holder, wrenched it out of Foley's grasp and threw it hard enough at where the NSA agent had been standing to punch through the wall.

"Magic, I guess," Tim said unhelpfully. "The dead guy said something about it belonging to tall and nasty."

Tyler played that bit of gloating back in his head. "'No merely physical being'," he quoted. "The guy must have swallowed a thesaurus."

Summers and Foley seemed to be keeping the demon away from its sword, but Tyler didn't think they were winning as such. The demon didn't have a scratch on it, while Summers was breathing heavily and Foley seemed to be having an even harder time of it. Tyler winced again as a glancing blow from Azrafel sent Foley spinning to the floor. He was back on his feet again in an instant, but all the times he was being knocked down had to be taking their toll.

"I'd better find that gun," Tyler muttered.

"Don't bother," Tim told him. "The damage those guys are dishing out, I doubt a .38 will make a lot of difference."

"It's better than nothing," Tyler said, "since I'm pretty sure I can't pick up that sword either. Unless you've got a better idea?" He looked across to see Tim closing his eyes with a pained expression on his face. "Tim?"

"I must be crazy," Tim said, "but hey, I'm dead, what's the worst that can happen?" Then he opened his eyes, set his jaw and ran towards the fight.

It took Tyler a moment to realise what was happening. Then Tim broke into the big circle that Azrafel had been summoned into, and suddenly the reassuring figment of Tyler's imagination that looked like Tim and sounded like Tim and sometimes God help him even smelled like Tim, suddenly he was transparent and slightly misty, just like Azrafel had been. And as Summers and Foley carried on annoying the demon, behind it Tim reached down his ghostly, heart-achingly non-physical hand and took up the sword.

"Hey ugly, looking for this?"

Azrafel half turned as Tim thrust the sword forward, driving it under the demon's arm and into its chest. Just for a moment everything stopped, then Azrafel threw back its head and screamed.

Tyler clutched his head as the sound tore through him like a physical blow. When he could look again, Azrafel was writhing as it stood spitted on the sword, its skin bubbling and sloughing off in chunks. Neon blue lightning sprang from it in flash after flash, jabbing down the blade into and through Tim, reigniting the remaining candles. In all the chaos only one thing was clear to Tyler; Tim was screaming too.

He wasn't conscious of starting to run. He wasn't thinking at all, not really. All that was going through his head was that Tim was here, and Tim was hurting, and Tim needed him right now. Then he cannoned into Tim, dragging him away by sheer momentum as the demon and the sword both exploded into black dust, blue lightning, and a last fading scream.

Tim groaned. "Oh God, that hurt more than getting shot."

Tyler dragged himself to his knees. "Where does it hurt?" he asked, starting to check Tim over for injuries.

"All over," Tim said. "Whatever that lightning was, it..." He trailed off, eyes wide.

Tyler stilled. "What?"

"You can touch me," Tim breathed. He put his hand over Tyler's hand, and Tyler realised that either he had finally gone completely insane, or he really could touch Tim. He could feel Tim's chest underneath his hand, Tim's hand on his. He could feel the familiar contours of Tim's cheek as he moved his hands up to caress him, still not quite daring to believe. He could feel Tim's hand in his hair, pulling him down to kiss.

A throat cleared loudly, and they jerked apart. Tyler looked up to see Summers standing there looking amused while attempting to look innocent.

Next to her, Foley seemed to be a good deal more confused and a little wild-eyed into the bargain. "I've been having a really bad day," he said unsteadily, "so I'd really appreciate it if someone would tell me what the hell just happened!"

"Uh, the bad guy exploded?" Tyler offered.

"Torn apart by his own minions," Summers said with a smirk. "You've got to admit there's a certain irony to it."

"No, I mean what was that thing? I've hit walls that were less solid than it was. And all the lightning that wasn't lightning?"

Summers ignored the plea in Foley's eyes. "Remember that talk we had about demons and magic?" she asked. "I wasn't kidding."

Foley wilted. "I was really hoping you weren't going to say that."

"Hey, you survived your first demon without screaming, running away or dying. Not a lot of people can say that. Plus you can tell your bosses whatever you want about what went on. It's not like they've got the clearance to know what really happened."

"Oh yeah, report writing," Foley muttered disconsolately. "That's really going to cheer me up."

"Uh-huh," Tim agreed fervently, sitting up slowly. "This is one case I'm glad I don't have to explain to Horatio."

Foley nodded glumly, then looked narrowly at Tim. "Thanks for the save," he said.

Tim nodded, then looked away in mild embarrassment the way he always did when he received an unexpected compliment. Tyler found himself grinning fit to bust.

"I don't want to seem ungrateful or anything," Foley continued, "but who the hell are you, and how did you get in here?"

"Sorry." Tim pulled himself and Tyler upright, and stuck the hand that wasn't firmly attached to Tyler out to Foley. "I'm Tim Speedle, I work... worked with Tyler. I guess you could say I've been with you the whole time, you just didn't see me."

Foley frowned, but Tyler didn't really care. His attention was all on Tim. "That really was you?" he half asked, half stated. "Since...?" He still couldn't say the words. "I thought I was going crazy."

"I told you you were stronger than that," Tim told him gently, bringing his hand up to cup Tyler's cheek. "You've always been stronger than me."

Tyler leaned into the touch for a moment, another little reassurance that his Tim really was there. He turned to Summers and asked pleadingly, "What I don't understand is how come Tim's... well, how come he's here now."

Summers shrugged her shoulders. "I'm not exactly your go-to gal for magical stuff," she admitted. "It must have been something to do with that stupid summoning spell they did tangling with him as well. More than that I'd have to ask Willow, and I wouldn't understand half the answer. The important thing," she said to Tim, looking suddenly very serious, "is how much do you remember?"

"About what?" Foley interrupted, looking more confused than ever.

"Being dead," Summers said flatly. Foley gaped.

"Not a lot," Tim admitted quietly. Tyler squeezed his hand, and got a small smile for his trouble. "I remember how frustrating it was not being able to touch anyone. I remember every single minute I watched you, Ty. But for the rest..." He shook his head. "Sorry, but I don't remember any bright lights or tunnels or angels dancing on the heads of pins."

"Good," Summers said with surprising firmness. Tyler manfully didn't ask her what she meant, but neither he nor Tim could keep the curiosity off their faces. "According to my ex-boyfriend, being in hell is no fun," she elaborated, "and getting dragged out of heaven, that's not something you want to remember. Trust me."

"Do I want to know how you know that?" Foley asked her. From the sound of his voice, he was hoping for the answer 'No'.

"Hey, do you hear me asking how you pulled off that impressive bit of not dying messily?"

"Only because you know I'd say it's classified."

"The scary thing is that you'd enjoy saying it."

Tyler couldn't help but laugh. He'd been living under the cloud of Tim's death for so long that now having him back, nothing else really mattered. He had Tim again, and judging from the way Tim was gripping his hand, he was going to have Tim for a long time, no matter what anyone said. And Horatio was going to have plenty to say, he was sure of that much, and being Horatio he was going to demand answers that actually made sense. Unless...

"Hey, Foley, how are you at faking new backgrounds for people?"


	7. Epilogue

Dan Cooper set down his soda can, looked around his new glass-walled office in the Miami-Dade crime lab, leaned back in his chair and stretched. Life was good. Life was better than he had any right to expect it to be, to be honest, which usually meant it was about to come crashing down around his ears. But hey, he was used to that, and right now he was going to enjoy the moment while it lasted.

His cellphone rang. Dan smiled as he looked at the caller ID; good as life was, there was still one thing that could make it better, and here she was now. "Hi, Maria."

"So how did it go?" Maria asked, typically direct and to the point.

"I got the job." Four words, but none of the others really understood how much they meant to him. _He_ had a _job;_ a real job, not just flipping burgers, even if they all told him he flipped a mean burger.

The squeal that threatened to burst his eardrum told him that maybe he hadn't managed to sound quite as nonchalant as he'd tried. "I told you you would, you doofus," she said. "All those night classes with computers had to be good for something."

Dan grunted, trying to recapture some aloofness. There wasn't really any point bothering when Maria knew him better than anyone else, but it was the principle of the thing. "I just push the buttons, it's the computer that does all the hard work. I'm just lucky their last guy left when he did."

"That sounds awfully convenient."

"Good to hear that all that journalistic training hasn't stopped you being paranoid," Dan said, keeping his tone teasing though he understood the deadly serious question. "Apparently the guy just upped and left to go live in a cabin in the woods, seriously annoying the boss. And yes," he added before she could say the obvious, "I did check, and yes, he really is living in the woods. With his boyfriend."

"Wow," she said. "The boyfriend is that hot?"

"How should I know?" Dan shot back. "Maybe I should send your cousin some pictures and get his professional opinion."

"Don't you dare!" There was enough of the old Maria in that for Dan to know that he risked actual bodily harm if he carried out his threat. "I've only just got him to stop squealing over that photo of Max and Kyle you forwarded. Apparently they are hotter than a very hot thing, and Dana whined non-stop for weeks about when I was going to invite them over."

Dan grinned. "I take it the big gay road-trip is still going on?" he asked.

"I don't think they know how to stop," Maria laughed. "You know how they are. Max has to fix every problem he sees, and Kyle won't let him hang around if he thinks they've been seen doing anything. Plus I think they have this secret plan to have sex in every small town in America."

Dan pulled a face. "Don't make me think about Maxwell like that," he said. "There isn't enough therapy in the world to get that image out of my head. Though I might forgive you if you told me that our little Floridian newspapers were about to be graced by the great Celeste herself."

Maria sighed, and Dan could practically hear the roll of her eyes that went with his poke at her new identity. "I can't, Michael," she said, "not yet. I've only just got where I am here, leaving Manhattan now would look weird and that's the last thing we need. And Dana's been a big help getting me sorted out, I owe him too much to bail just yet." She paused. "At least you've settled down now. I will catch up with you eventually, I promise, I just need some time."

Dan bit back several comments that sprang instantly to mind. Dan Cooper was supposed to be a relaxed guy, after all, but Maria could always always provoke the old him. He was scared of losing her, even though all of them splitting up had been the smart thing to do; long distance relationships sucked, and if even Max and Liz couldn't stay together, what chance did he and Maria have?

"I guess so," he said eventually. "You know, I never expected we'd all be stopping and getting domestic like this."

There was a pause, then Maria said gently, "So who have you heard from, then?"

Damn, but that woman was too perceptive sometimes. "Izzy," he said. "She did her usual thing," coming waltzing into his head while he was asleep, which was too disturbing for words, "and told me that we weren't forgiven, but she wanted us to know that she was OK. She got that place at Seattle Grace she told Max about."

Maria snorted. "Funny, I never thought of her as the doctor type. That was always Max's thing."

"Max isn't stupid," Dan told her. "He knows he couldn't hang around a hospital without being tempted to help things along. One thing would lead to another, and before you know it the press would be full of miracle cures."

"I'll try not to take that personally," Maria said dryly.

Oops. "Have you heard from Liz?" Dan asked, trying to brazen it out.

"Nice try, but don't think I'll forget about that, mister. Yes, I've heard from her. You knew she'd got her PhD in Molecular Biology?"

"I've been waiting for her to turn up and start running experiments on me," Dan said, not entirely joking.

"You are so lucky you are too far away to hit, Michael. Anyway, believe it or not, she's applied for a job at NORAD."

Dan sat up straight. "What? Is she crazy? Our IDs are good, but they're not that good. If the military check up on her..."

"They must have, but it all worked. She's got the job."

"Shit," Dan said with feeling. "I don't like it, something's got to be wrong with that setup."

"Like why do they want a molecular biologist under Cheyenne Mountain in the first place?"

Dan sat back and groaned. "Oh God, she's investigating the military. She is, isn't she?"

"I'm her oldest friend. I know her well enough to be sure... she's totally checking it out," Maria admitted eventually.

"Shit," Dan moaned again. "We'd better take precautions."

"This is Liz we're talking about. I'm sure she'll be OK."

Dan stared at his phone for a second. "Right," he said sarcastically, "with her track record the worst that can happen is that she finds out that there really are little green men and falls for their leader. Oh no, wait, she's done that already."

"Michael," Maria said sharply, and Dan knew he was in for it. That was typical, though; Liz did something that was unbelievably dangerous for them all, and somehow he was the bad guy.

"Just take care," he said. "I miss you, and I don't want..." It was as much as he had words for.

"I know. I love you too, idiot."

A half-seen movement in the corridor outside reminded Dan that he wasn't entirely alone. "Hey," he said, clearing his throat, "someone's coming. It looks like they're going to make me do some actual work here after all."

"Try not to let the shock kill you," Maria advised. "Talk to you again soon."

"Yeah. Bye."

As the door to his office opened, Dan closed his phone, swept up his soda and spun round in his chair, aiming for his very best laid-back pose.

Eric Delko wasn't impressed when the new hire started choking on his drink.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Footnotes:** a scorecard for those playing "Six Degrees" and too lazy to check on IMDb:
> 
> Dan Cooper was played by Brendan Fehr, who also played Michael Guerrin in "Roswell"
> 
> Maria DeLuca was played by Majendra Delfino, who also played Celeste Blodgett in "Celeste in the City", and whose cousin Dana was played by a certain Nicholas Brendon
> 
> Isabel Evans was played by Katherine Heigl, who also plays Dr Isobel Stevens in "Gray's Anatomy"
> 
> Liz Parker's story comes from a plot bunny thrown to the wolves by silk_knickers, for whose permission to mention it I am very grateful.
> 
> Max Evans and Kyle Valenti's Big Gay Road Trip would have made a great 70s episodic show. Maybe I'll write some postcards from them some day.
> 
> Finally, Eric Delko is played by Adam Rodriguez, who played Jesse Ramirez (Mr Isabel Evans) on "Roswell"


End file.
